Tuesday 26 July 2016

A wet winter

 A beautiful winter's morning, with fresh snow on the mountain and sunshine in our valley. Apparently it's been the wettest three months on record, and we've had unbelievably ferocious winds, deep frosts, and even occasional snowfalls, but the birds have survived everything, and I am delighted to report we still have all 16 Coturnix quails plus the valiant Plum, our little King quail. 

 
The birds are eating ravenously, foraging through the muddy garden and coming for supplementary seed-feeding twice a day. They have eaten almost all our stockpile of sunflower heads - we'll need to plant three times as many this year! There are some early signs of Spring behaviour, with the stronger and more aggressive males beginning to viciously attack some of the older birds, especially at feed times. There's heaps of room for everyone, so the older birds usually just fly away to another part of the garden if it gets too bad, but there's a lot of jostling and shoving - like unruly kids waiting in a line. We may yet be eating a couple of plump young males if they carry on too much...
Our soggy garden is looking a bit the worse for wear, but the bulbs are starting to come up, and we have had good crops of parsley, spinach and the wonderful Oca all year round. Oca is a yam-like vegetable (a giant oxalis, usually the gardener's bane) that roasts and boils beautifully and copes with flooding, freezing and blazing heat. The quails sometimes sleep in amongst the rows - there's not a lot else in the garden for them to shelter under - apart from artichoke and cabbage...We have a few nesting boxes for them, but they rarely use them, preferring to ride out the rain and wind in the open. 
No sign of rats - two layers of chicken wire around the base of the enclosure plus the bird netting seems to be working...

There are flocks of currawongs creating havoc - the 'storm birds' who come in over winter and raid our neighbours' chook pens for scraps...they are loud and cheeky and harass the quails, perching on the net and watching them greedily as they eat their seeds. A currawong would kill a quail, and they are intelligent, they pull at the wires joining the pieces of netting and we've twice had to repair large holes where they have succeeded in getting it apart. They also love the moss around our frog ponds, ripping it up and throwing it around the garden, hunting for frogs. The quails just ignore them. I am not so sanguine, and occasionally throw rocks at them (I miss) and yell when they rip up another piece of carefully replaced moss and rip holes in my pond liner with their scimitar-like beaks...